Swanage & Wareham RFC Recommended Club Social Media Code

At Swanage & Wareham RFC, we recognise that a communications revolution has taken place. Many of our players, coaches, trainers, club members and supporters spend considerable amounts of time on social media.

As a progressive club, we encourage people to use social media for club business, to show their support for a great rugby team and to reach specific age groups. We ask all our members and supporters to uphold the ethos of the club in all their social media posts and interactions and to not act in a way that would bring the club into disrepute or harm its reputation.

The following social media code is intended to help members with practical advice on how to use social media effectively for the benefit of the club and its membership. It is not the club’s intention to restrict your use of social media; rather, we want to ensure that you use these new tools responsibly and respectfully when discussing club matters.

Please refer to this code whenever you mention Swanage & Wareham RFC in your social media posts and updates across the ever-expanding list of social media sites, including, but not limited to twitter, facebook, google+, instagram, tumblr and YouTube. This code also applies to internet forums, blogs, podcasts, pictures and video.

1. Be responsible and respectful at all times.
2. Remember everything you say is instantly in the public domain.
3. Don’t forget that you are responsible for what you post.
4. Your comments may be available for anyone to see permanently.
5. Consider the potential consequences for you and the club of the things you publish.
6. Don’t ever say something in a post that you wouldn’t be happy to say to someone’s face.
7. Don’t insult, cyberbully, attack or make negative comments about this club or other club’s players, parents, coaches, managers, referees, training staff or their supporters.
8. Any negative commentary, such as a grievance or criticism should be directed to the individual or respective managers or coaches.
9. If you see a negative comment, do not respond or escalate the issue in any way.
10. Serious issues or concerns should be discussed with the Club’s Executive Committee.
11. Avoid gossip, inappropriate, defamatory, hateful, slanderous, upsetting or threatening comments.
12. Do not post comments that could be judged to be harassment, abuse or libellous.
13. Do not post comments intended to incite violence against others.
14. Do not post any content that might be considered inappropriate or offensive to others.
15. Respect the privacy and confidentiality of others in your posts: consider carefully how the text, audio, images and videos you post may breach someone else’s privacy.
16. Do not impersonate or falsely represent another person in your posts.

Serious or persistent breaches of this Code will be referred to the Club’s Management Committee via the Club Chairman and action may be taken against the offending member or supporter.

Ultimately, at Swanage & Wareham RFC, we want all of our members to feel comfortable taking their support for the Club into the online domain.

We believe that by being positive, responsible, sharing our successes and being gracious in defeat that we will not only get the most out of these new forms of media, we will also be viewed by other teams, the league and rugby as a whole, as an example of how to use social media for the benefit of all.